The Cirrus will probably work with pretty much any Dos game - CL542x chips were incredibly common back then as low-middle range designs. It will likely be as fast as you ever need in Dos.

However, the Mach32 will be a better windows accelerator, if you intend to run Windows in addition to Dos.

I remember switching from a VLB Cirrus Logic card to a Mach32 back in the day. For some reason the Cirrus Logic card refused to do 800x600 at 56 Hz in Windows, even though it could do 1024x768 at 43 Hz interlaced.

Hmm. Gaming is the primary purpose, but I will be running Windows as well. Guess I'll have to experiment.

I could barely notice the benefits between GUI accelerators back then. 486s are so slow at Windows apps anyway.

I can comment on the GD5428, I have 3 of these. None of them are really stable on 50 Mhz FSB. On 33 or 40 Mhz, however, they are decent performers. You can use the Cirrus tweaking utilities (vogonsdrivers is your friend) to optimize / overclock the card. Cannot remember all the settings but I recall my cards can safely go from 48Mhz to 57Mhz with tighter timings. Overall performance gain is between 12-14%. Cirrus cards are very compatible as you can see in the compatibility chart by Gona (VLB or PCI does not matter here)

For ISA/VLB then Mach32/64 were the end of the line or pretty near it for those two buses. They usually had plenty of video memory installed for the time period (2mb or 4mb) so higher resolutions and greater color depths were possible. My ISA Mach64 claims 16.7 million colors but it uses a dithering mode to achieve that as that many colors in 1280x1024 resolution pushes the limits of even 4mb of video memory.

Here's an old thread with pics of my ISA card still in the unopened box.

Holy Grail found!